Saturday May 15th - Dunkirk Lighthouse - Dunkirk NY - no hike

 Our long weekend in Ohio started with a long drive.  On the way we took mostly US-20 West and then NY and PA 5 along the shoreline of Lake Erie.  The lighthouse was an impulse stop. Brian was driving and I was looking on the web and saw that it was only open until to and it was nearly 1 pm when we got there so I imagined we might be able to catch the last tour of the day.  

We did catch (or rather cause there to be) the last tour and our tour guide, Dave (?) was very talkative and knowledgeable.  I noticed that he seemed very aware that different people find different aspects of the Lighthouse and museum interesting.  Besides the centerpiece of the lighthouse itself, the lighthouse keeper’s house is part preserved dwelling, part military museum.  There were little trinkets like a set of cost guard china and lots of domestic housewares etc and also larger things like the way the house itself was structured to keep the lamp oil away from the main part of the house or the way the lighthouse keeper’s bed gave him a view of the light so he could monitor it at a glance.

Brian’s favorite part was the amazing views of the lake and the eagle from the top of the lighthouse.  He got some good photos from there.






After the lighthouse, I had some server maintenance tasks I had to do for work. Kind of unfortunate to have to do it on a weekend away but it had already been postponed once so I just plowed through it as best I could from the passenger seat using my work laptop and work phone hotspot while Brian made slow but gradual progress on NY and PA-5 then some on US-20.  The work tasks were pretty tough to do because the connection wasn’t super stable and even uploading, by todays standards, a very small 16 MB file took several tries and many minutes.  Thankfully it all worked in the end and there weren’t any complications and the work was done well within the time allocated.

After that work was done I took over driving and used I-90 for an hour or so to blast some miles out.  Then we took OH-2 through downtown Cleveland and mostly OH-2 the rest of the way into Sandusky, our planned dinner stop.  Unfortunately, as is happening all over the US, Sandusky isn’t really ready for tourist season and the wait at Chili’s would have been very long despite the dining room being maybe half full.  This issue impacted us a 2nd time at the same Chili’s and even the place very close to the state park was clearly struggling with too little staff for the number of customers.

We arrived at the cabin around 7:30 pm.  It was an enjoyable but long driving day.

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